Where Did All The NIBY's Go?

Many years ago while I was married to Bonnie I lived in the little village of Weston where we rented our first one bedroom apartment back in June of 1982. Our 26th floor apartment had amazing unobstructed easterly views of Toronto from our large spacious balcony. The newly built building had been finished just a few months before we signed our first one year lease. It was perfect timing for us as Bonnie would now be able to live there. At the same time it gave us the opportunity to furnish the apartment and make it our home before our upcoming October wedding day. Most importantly it would give us the privacy back that we had both been missing for the previous six months.

We were both earning good money and were spending every cent we earned on our wedding expenses, furnishing our new apartment and our everyday living expenses. We had purchased a king size waterbed and we were already putting it to good use. Everything was slowly starting to come together as Bonnie and I eagerly looked forward to the lifetime journey that we would soon be embarking on.

Just over a year after we were married the ceiling in our bedroom began to drip water from the light fixture. The water would start dripping every time it rained and the light fixture was right above our waterbed. The waterbed was not at all that easy to move to another part of the bedroom. It was very annoying to say the least so I decided I would try to fix the leak myself. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I was able to remove the drop ceiling panels. On further examination I easily determined that the leak was coming from a small crack in the actual concrete ceiling right where the electrical box for the light fixture was also located.

No worries it should be an easy fix, I thought to myself.

Within a few hours the DIY black liquid tar-like waterproof solution I bought had already dried and I was about to apply the second coat. I was home alone standing on the waterbed trying to balance myself while checking how dry the first coat was when the whole first coat fell down right onto my face. I was furious; I had black sticky goo everywhere on my face, in my hair and on my shirt. Almost immediately I marched down to the management office in the lobby while I was still covered in tar. I am sure that I must have looked absolutely ridiculous and I could see that one of the ladies in the office was laughing at me. I told the building manager that we would be breaking our lease and we would be moving out at the end of the month.

I slammed the door as I exited the office. The building manager said nothing, she knew how pissed off I was and by the end of the month Bonnie and I had already signed a new lease in an older building just a couple of blocks away. It was a larger two bedroom apartment and I could throw pucks from our eleventh floor balcony hitting the roof of Weston Arena where I played hockey.

Back then Weston was a beautiful place to live and raise a family. It had a real small town country like atmosphere even though you were living within Canada’s largest city. Today because of our lax immigration laws the Village of Weston has now turned itself into one of the poorest and highest crime rate areas in Toronto. Simply put Weston resembles more of a ghetto than the quaint little village I once lived in.

After having lived in two apartments over a six year period, I was more than eager to get the fuck out of Weston once I saw changes creeping in. The neighborhood demographics were changing rather quickly and in my opinion it was not for the better. It seemed like overnight hundreds of refugees and immigrants from Somalia and Ethiopia had taken over the whole neighborhood. For me driving up Weston Road from my Lawrence Avenue apartment felt as if I was living in another country altogether.

With the incoming new immigrant population there was soon to be big changes in the area businesses. Within a decade of us leaving, gone were all the little places that made Weston a unique place to live, shop and eat. They were all now replaced with multi-cultural stores, eateries and churches catering to the areas new demographics.

Although I later discovered that Weston could be a sketchy place long before the newcomers arrived.

While Bonnie and I rented our second apartment on Lawrence Avenue, we lived in apartment #1103. When you got off the elevator on the 11th floor there were three apartments directly in front of you, we lived in the one to the left. The middle apartment was #1104 and the one to the right was #1105.

Apartment #1105 had a very noticeable large steel plate around the door handle and lock. It was an odd look and I always wondered if a repair was needed why management never just replaced the door. The steel plate was quite ugly and it stuck out like a sore thumb. Other than the ugly plate nothing else about the building really bothered me.

Years later after I moved out of Weston while working on my ice cream route I got chatting with one of the receivers at an A&P store. We discovered that we had both lived in the Weston and Lawrence area. We both lived in the same building and to boot we both had lived on the 11th floor. After telling Glen who was a biker guy that I lived in apartment #1103 he told me that he had lived in #1105. Almost immediately the ugly steel plate flashed into my head and I asked Glen if the plate was on the door when he lived there. It was then that Glen told me the story behind the steel plate on his front door.

Glen was not home at the time but the girl he shared the apartment with was home along with three other men. He explained that it was a stolen goods deal that went bad and when it was all said and done the three men who were there were all murdered inside the apartment. Glen's roommate was shot twice in the head and was found on the balcony. She survived.

On July 15th 1977 two masked men had broken into the apartment by smashing the front door lock with a sledgehammer. Hence the reason for the ugly steel plate that was needed to repair the door. Within minutes the two shooters were fleeing down the stairwell and days later they were apprehended by police.

The stairwell was the exact same stairwell where I had climbed stairs hundreds of times during the five years while I lived there. It was the exact same stairwell where two other men have since been murdered, also shot dead since I moved out in 1988. I have never been one for accepting or liking change especially when the change makes me feel like a minority in my own country. I have absolutely no doubt that leaving Weston when we did was one of the smartest decisions I have ever made in my life.

Today I no longer go into the Weston ghetto. Over the years there have been numerous drive by shootings and many innocent people have been killed. It's too bad there wasn’t the NIBY (Not In My Backward) movement back when I was living in Weston. It just might have remained a quaint little village and a great place to live and raise a family.

*Update – As I write this story there have been three more murders at my old Lawrence Ave building, five in total since I left. All those killed were young black men and all three had been victims of gun violence.